2017: A Slow Start

1: Summer at Tiffany, Marjorie Hart

Memoir of naive country girl and her friend, who spent the summer of 1945 in New York City working at Tiffany & Co. There are some cute anecdotes, but the wide-eyed naiveté of two Iowa college girls has not aged well.

2: The Turk: The life and times of the famous eighteenth-century chess-playing machine, Tom Standage

Fun pop-history. I read Charles Michael Carroll's The Great Chess Automaton eight years ago, and don't remember enough to compare the two. Sigh.

3: On Time: the history of Electro-Motive division of General Motors Corporation, Franklin M. Reck

Amusing book from 1948, it reads like half advertisement for GM trains, half pop-history.

4: Hitler's Private Library: the books that shaped his life, Timothy W. Ryback

An interesting concept. Only 1000-1500 of Hitler's books are in known locations, of more than 16,000 known to have existed. Even given this limited sample, it seems like one could pick some interesting books, and Ryback certainly tries. In the end, though, the choices don't seem to have enough individual interest, nor hang together well. Despite an an awful lot of extrapolation from single volumes, there's no good overarching story here, unless it's that Hitler was not stupid but incredibly naive and uneducated, and swimming in hubris.

I was glad to find this bit about book collecting:

In his essay on book collecting, Walter Benjamin suggests that most bibliophiles have read at best 10 percent of their collections and claims to base his estimate on good authority. "Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, 'And have you read all these books, Monsieur France?' " Benjamin recalls that the grand old man of French prose and Nobel Prize laureate deftly replied, "Not one tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?"

5: Elements of the Universe, Glenn T. Seaborg and Evans G. Valens

How many valence electron jokes do you think the second author endured during the writing of this book? It's YA pop-sci from 1958. This bit of the foreword is particularly poignant, given the current political situation in the USA:

Personally, we feel that the population as a whole should learn more about science. In fact we feel that science should be a part of the repertoire of a cultured man today. We need great leadership in all fields by men who are cognizant of the values of our civilization and the factors which influence it. The liberal education that prepares men for such leadership must include science as an integral part, for science is too central a part of our modern culture to be ignored.

6: Hitler: the memoir of a Nazi insider who turned against the Führer, Ernst Hanfstaengl

The picture Hanfstaengl paints of Hitler matches what comes out of Ryback's book, to a certain extent: no formal education, massive self-confidence, (intentional?) naiveté about certain things, etc. Hanfstaengl almost necessarily paints an almost pleasant picture of the 1920's Hitler. Even taking this picture with a grain of salt, one can understand how he got to power. It reminds one in alarming fashion of the current occupant of the White House. Confirmation bias certainly plays into this, but the number of parallels is frightening.

7: On Tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century, Timothy Snyder

Jean leant this to me. She bought half a dozen copies she's having people read.

The thing was clearly written in a hurry, and the lack of footnotes and sources drives me mad. Several assertions boggle the mind and make one scream for sources, e.g. "In the rare cases when they refused these orders to murder Jews, [regular German] policemen were not punished."

The other thing that bothers me is the careful dancing around giving specific examples of Trump's tyrannical behaviour. At the very least, I would have liked to see an explanation for this, no doubt well-considered, choice.